the pink and blue blues

I went for a quick shopping trip the other day in my lunch break to find two baby-related gifts. One for a newborn to our wonderful friends, and one for a nephew's first birthday. I'm not very good with children in general, probably partly because I never really grew up with kids around, of any age from babies to teenagers. It's all a bit new and strange to me. Exciting but daunting. So subjecting myself to departments full of baby-ness is not exactly my worst nightmare, but I'm certainly neither comfortable or know much about what I'm doing.

Leafing through the many racks of baby blankets in the requisite baby pink and baby blue, dummies, bottles and rattles, I started to despair. Is this all there is??? Am I mad in thinking this is boring??? Then I spied the toddler/young child section over the aisle. This seemed infinitely more interesting! It was full of colour, interesting shapes and patterns, and awesome looking toys and clothes. I actually started getting excited, thinking I might actually be able to find something cool and fun! But almost every thing I picked up and looked at said ages 2+. All those funky toys with bright colours, flashing lights, bits and pieces to put together and pull apart... turns out they're all for toddlers who have started to toddle and figured out that they have opposable thumbs.

Which left me back at square one. I had to choose between simpering pink and wishy washy blue. I tried in vain to make myself believe that these things were pretty, that they would be useful, that they would make great gifts. But who was I kidding. They were hideous. From the get go, gender demarcation was high on the agenda, and there was almost nothing I could do about it. It was a sea of pink for girls and blue for boys, and I was drowning in it and had to get out. On my way out, I stopped and looked at the greeting cards hoping to find something neutral and fun and supportive and loving. But lo and behold, yep you guessed it, blue cards declaring loudly 'It's a BOY' with pictures of cars, and pink cards proclaiming 'It's a GIRL' with butterflies.

Am I the only one who finds this all a little disturbing?!?! There were no cards proudly but simply communicating 'congratulations on your new baby'. Ok, so perhaps the range may have been limited, but is it really so much to ask for something a little less... well... gendered???

It seems like the first thing we all want to know about a baby is whether it's a boy or a girl. I'd like to think it doesn't really matter, but of course it does because it dictates how the new human being will be treated, educated and socially constructed. This is where the pink and blue comes in, and why it remains in perpetuity. So that we can easily identify the different genders, demarcate them, so that we can treat them differently. As I was looking through all those funky looking toys it dawned on me that all the 'girls' toys were various shades of pink and purple and consisted of dolls, fluffy animals, and sparkly hula hoops (ok, so a sparkly hula hoop is actually kinda cool) and the boys things were all bold blues and greens and reds, and consisted of cars, lego and footballs. The gender stratification starts before birth and continues until after death (honestly, how many blokes end up with pink roses on their coffins...).

While I think gender identification and constructions are vitally important in society - males and females are quite different in many resepcts after all - I can't help but wonder if it's gone into hyper-drive a bit. It just all seems so limited, and so forced upon the individual at family, social and cultural levels, that I wonder if there is much scope for doing things a bit differently.

I reflect upon my own childhood and remember the barbies and fairy costumes that I loved so much. But I also remember dressing up as Batman (complete with utility belt of course!), digging worms out of the creek, going fishing for frogspawn and racing each other on our bikes. Maybe it's just the rose-tinted glasses phenomenon, but it feels like I had so much more freedom of choice and freedom of expression. I look at Bratz dolls and cringe in despair. Do pink blankets and romper suits turn into this? What kind of girls and boys are we creating, or has it always been this way and I'm only just now seeing it?

I ended up going to a bookstore and getting Possum Magic, Diary of a Wombat, a fluffy possum that hangs by her tail and a fluffy wombat hand puppet. Ah books, the last refuge of a babied-out shopper. Stuff the pink and blue blankies, I don't want to be a part of this constrained gender constuction just yet!